I'll give you a practical example. What specific emotions do you feel when you take a moment to consider the following two lists of five words extracted from your comment?

1) mystical, Christian, exotic, prayer, pitched

2) productive, evaluate, tools, objective, applies

Answer the question (privately if you like) and you just "meditated".

Meditation is self-observation, nothing more, nothing less. If you want to learn more about how the specific "tedks" configuration of neurons works, that's what meditation (a.k.a. self-reflection, self-observation) promises, as opposed to science which by definition cannot do this. I'm pretty sure that many of the things you consider valuable already do count as meditation (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5331514 ), it's just that nobody labelled them as such or built a formal discipline around them. That might be part of why meditation seems like such BS to you.

The stuff about sitting there with your eyes closed and focusing on your breathing isn't really necessary (I don't really do this anymore), all that's meant to do is help you slow your brain down so you can look at it, kind of like using a debugger. You can get kind of high from that and while fun it can be a hindrance in all sorts of other ways.

All the spiritual stuff you see is perhaps best described as a metaphor for the kinds of things people experience, since they don't have better words for it. Ultimately there isn't a particular belief system tied to meditation, kind of like there isn't a particular belief system tied to the act of debugging a program (although people do like to get into holy wars).

Finally, there's this joke that says all Buddhists are either meditating or feeling guilty about not meditating. So if someone is telling you that you "should" meditate they are quite possibly projecting some of their own guilt about their own spiritual practice onto you. Of course had they been practicing meditation by being "mindful" in the conversation with you (this is just code for "paying attention to their own thoughts and feelings while not sitting in silence somewhere"), they would see that this is what their feelings were doing and they'd probably choose not to pressure you like that.

Anyway, hope this helps.

user:	georgeorwell
created:	March 21, 2012
karma:	1.0k
about:	How come nobody cares about my other books?